The Emigree

• There once was a country... I left it as a child but my memory of it is sunlight-clear
• for it seems I never saw it in that November which, I am told, comes to the mildest city.
• The worst news I receive of it cannot break my original view,
• the bright, filled paperweight.
• It may be at war, it may be sick with tyrants,
•  but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.
• The white streets of that city, the graceful slopes glow even clearer as time rolls its tanks
•  and the frontiers rise between us, close like waves.
• That child's vocabulary I carried here like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar.
• Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it.
• It may by now be a lie, banned by the state
•  but I can't get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight.
• I have no passport, there's no way back at all
•  but my city comes to me in its own white plane.
• It lies down in front of me, docile as paper;
• I comb its hair and love its shining eyes.
• My city takes me dancing through the city of walls.
•  They accuse me of absence, they circle me.
• They accuse me of being dark in their free city.
• My city hides behind me.
•  They mutter death, and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.